THE FITZWILLIAM STRING QUARTET

Founded in 1968 by four Cambridge undergraduates, the Fitzwilliam was one of the first of a long line of distinguished quartets to have emerged under the guidance of Sidney Griller at the Royal Academy of Music. They originally became well known through their close personal association with Dmitri Shostakovich, who befriended them following a visit to York to hear them play. He entrusted them with the Western premières of his last three quartets, and before long they had become the first ever group to perform and record all fifteen - complete cycles were given in a number of major centres, including London, New York, and Montréal. These achievements secured for them a long term contract with Decca, which embraced some byways of late Romantic repertoire - including Franck, Delius, Borodin, and Sibelius - before they embarked on a Beethoven cycle. Their recordings have gained many international awards, including the very first Gramophone Award for chamber music, in 1977. Their Shostakovich set (recently re-released) was included by the same publication in their “Hundred Greatest-ever Recordings” in November 2005. A world-wide concert schedule has taken them across Europe (including USSR/Russia), North America, Africa, and the Far East.

Their commitment to contemporary music does not end with Shostakovich, and over thirty additions to the new century’s repertoire have been requested or promised during the past seven years – notably a cycle of four annual commissions from the Swaledale Festival, each with strong Yorkshire connections. The first of these was Rachel Stott’s Quiet Earth, based on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, followed in 2003 by Stone from Peter Dyson (a Yorkshireman living in St Petersburg) which actually included the building of a dry stone wall on stage! Next came the turn of Matthew King, who had previously written his first quartet for the Fitzwilliam (first performed at the 2002 Canterbury Festival); Duncan Druce completed the series in the Summer of 2005 by returning to the Wuthering Heights theme. At the other end of the musical spectrum, it was in the early eighties that they first began to adopt historical instruments for Classical and Early Romantic music; their Schumann CD with Richard Burnett - featuring the much loved piano quintet - was a première recording on original instruments and a top recommendation on BBC Radio 3’s Building a Library. They remain one of the very few string quartets in Britain to follow this practice, making them unique in that they perform on both early and modern set-ups - sometimes within the same concert!

They were Quartet-in-Residence at the University of York for twelve years and at the University of Warwick for three, as well as Affiliate Artists at Bucknell University, USA, since 1978. Nine years ago they began a new Residency at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, with similar associations at Bangor and London Royal Holloway following soon after and another at Wits University in Johannesburg scheduled to commence in 2008, coming at the end of a tour which also takes in Grahamstown, Cape Town, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth, and Durban.

Extremely generous private patronage has made possible a new collaboration with Linn Records, which began in May 2000 with Haydn’s Seven Last Words. Recordings continued last May with the Brahms clarinet quintet (released in January). They returned to the studio in November for a disc of 20th cent English songs with piano quintet (including Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge), in which they collaborated with James Gilchrist and Anna Tilbrook (scheduled for release in June); future include string music by Purcell, the Bruckner string quintet, and the complete quartets of Tchaikovsky. In July 2001 they made their first ever trip to South Africa, where they gave two concerts in the National Arts Festival (the second largest in the world, after Edinburgh) - including the world première of Michael Blake’s new quartet. Other recent travels have taken them to Germany, Sweden, to Slovenia for the first time, as well as to Munich, where they took part in an international dance film featuring Shostakovich's last three quartets. There have also been four trips to Russia, which included sharing an all-Tchaikovsky programme with the St. Petersburg Klassika Symphony Orchestra, plus concerts in Pushkin's House, the Summer Palace at Peterhof, and the Sheremetev Palace, as well as at Agora - former home of Modest Tchaikovsky, where his brother regularly stayed: their 'Green Room' was the room where the composer had breakfast with Chekhov! Also off the normal beaten track is a collaboration with the German saxophonist Uwe Steinmetz, who has written three new works for them to play with his jazz group European Art Ensemble - their CD of Steinmetz’s Bonhoeffer Suite has now been released in Germany. Their latest trip to the USA included a marathon three-hour event in Lorin Maazel’s private concert hall at his farm near the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. They currently have invitations to visit Greece/Turkey, Canada, South Africa, China, and India, and 2006 saw return visits to Spain, Switzerland, the USA, and to Russia in October for the Shostakovich centenary celebrations. Indeed, it was this special anniversary which, not surprisingly, was at the centre of their activities last year – but with more than a passing reference to the Mozart 250th anniversary as well.